Weirdos In Wisconsin: Defending the KKK, Odd Sheriffs & Walker's Revenge

How're those charter schools working Gov Walker?

These are truly strange times we are living in.

Depending upon how you voted back on November 8th, yesterday's Electoral College vote confirming Donald Trump's victory was either a cause for celebration, or a depressing reminder of the current state of American democracy.

Bill Clinton was clearly not pleased.

In Wisconsin, where Tea Party puppet Republican Governor Scott Walker's very first state budget back in 2011 included $800 million in cuts to public schools while expanding charter school vouchers for Milwaukee students, an African-American teacher was recently relieved of her teaching duties at the Business and Economics Academy of Milwaukee after she sent a letter to parents of her seventh grade students explaining a class assignment for them to write an essay defending the Ku Klux Klan as a persuasive writing assignment.

Now I don't know that charter school teacher personally or anything, nor am I a teacher, but you can teach persuasive writing to seventh grade students without having them think up ways to defend a white supremacist terrorist organization.

Seriously, between her highly inappropriate classroom assignment and the unhinged right-wing Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke's recent call for people to take up "pitchforks and torches" against the federal government, the White House, the Department of Justice and what he calls "big media", black folk in Wisconsin got some strange-ass ideas.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke

If you thought Sheriff Clarke's bizarre right-wing spiel at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland earlier this summer was out there, take a couple minutes and watch some of his demented rant against the amorphous evil of big media.

Which, in the sheriff's eye, includes the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC - I'm guessing the First Amendment just isn't really his thing.

If you watch that video clip, remember this guy is the Sheriff of the fifth-largest city in the American mid-west.

Either he seals himself in a hermetic chamber and binge watches Fox News while listening to Alex Jones at night, or he's a got a serious man-crush on Arizona's xenophobic soon-to-be ex-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

You heard about Arpaio's Fake News Extravaganza press conference last Thursday when he tried rekindling the long-debunked Birther Theory?

Yup, now that Sheriff Joe's incessant hate-mongering has lost him his Sheriff's badge, he's resorted to proving that President Obama's birth certificate is fake - equal parts pathetic and strange.

But getting back to Wisconsin, in case you were wondering, Gov. Scott Walker's loopy brand of dehumanizing conservatism has only gotten weirder since he was one of the first presidential hopefuls to be bounced from the 2015 Republican Clown Car.

Scott Walker's hit-list includes the gray wolf. Really.

As Sophia Tesfaye reported in an article on Salon.com today, Walker sent a letter to Donald Trump requesting that the federal government loosen regulations to allow his state the autonomy to drug test food stamp recipients, increase premiums on Medicaid and legalize the hunting of the almost-extinct gray wolf.

Did Walker send his Christmas fantasy list for Santa to Trump by mistake?

Has Scott Walker reached the point where hunting the endangered gray wolf into extinction is a "freedom" to be cherished?

Does the gray (or timber) wolf represent some kind of existential threat to Walker's brand of way-off-the-ranch conservatism?

As Defenders of Wildlife's gray wolf fact-sheet notes, these amazing creatures play an important role in keeping the ecosystem in balance that scientists are just starting to fully understand.

Mankind almost killed them all off in the 1930's and they're just now starting to repopulate their species and return to habitats they once thrived in, so maybe Walker wanting to let people kill them all is just some kind of heartless and petty f*** you to animal rights activists?

Or perhaps Walker thinks he can score some cheap points with Trump by requesting the right to hunt one of North America's most endangered species in order to please the fake news-Tweeting Trump-spawn Donald Jr. and Eric - who like to flaunt their manhood by posing next to photos of endangered species they kill.

Regardless of his motivation, Gov. Walker still comes off as a spineless nincompoop from the same state that gave us tax cut fetishist Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump's newly appointed White House Chief of Staff, former RNC Chair Reince Priebus.

Like I said, strange times - and equally strange Republican men.

Crosscheck: GOP's Voter Suppression Data Monster

U.S. states where Crosscheck is used

With growing numbers of the Washington-based Republican establishment writing off Donald Trump's chances to win, all bets are off for GOP efforts to retain their majority in the Senate and the House next month when Americans head to the polls.

Paul Ryan's recent conference call to Republican lawmakers likely covered the importance of the GOP's ongoing ten-year mission.

Not to explore the depths of outer space like the Federation, but their darker mission to systematically and illegally prevent large blocks of American voters, who statistically tend to vote Democratic, from voting by taking advantage of an assortment of questionable "Voter ID" laws passed by majority-Republican state legislatures.

Republicans also have a monster to help them with that.

Not Trump, they created that monster but he's long since fled the castle to roam the countryside and they're no longer able to control him - and according to a recent New York Times article chronicling disturbing claims of his creepy, unwanted sexual groping and kissing by multiple women, Trump has a really hard time controlling his hands too.

The Republicans have a digital monster called Crosscheck that uses skewed data with intentionally oversimplified search parameters to systematically disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people across the nation from exercising their right to vote.

As Greg Palast reported in an article in the September 8th issue of Rolling Stone, one of the most important tools Republicans will be using to try and retain control of Congress is officially known as the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

Crosscheck mastermind Kris Kobach

According to Palast's research, thanks to Republican-majority state legislatures, some twenty-eight different states across the nation (see map above) use Crosscheck to compare names, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and birthdates.

All under the guise of trying to uncover individuals registered in more than one state who may vote twice; an almost non-existent offense Republicans falsely trumpet as being rampant.

Crosscheck was the twisted brainchild of one of the truly mad professors of Republican politics, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, creator of the same Arizona law that allowed Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to direct his deputies to illegally pull over thousands of Hispanic drivers to check their immigration status.

On Tuesday a federal court filed criminal contempt charges against Arpaio for refusing a court order to stop using sheriff's deputies to engage in immigration enforcement after slews of complaints from registered U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent being pulled over because of their ethnicity.

So how successful is Kobach's Crosscheck program?

According to Palast's article: "Crosscheck has tagged an astonishing 7.2 million suspects, yet we found no more than four perpetrators who have been charged with double-voting or deliberate double registration."

Greg Palast & some of the names flagged by Crosscheck

In an earlier article about the Crosscheck program that Palast wrote for Al Jazeera back in 2014, an analysis of lists containing over two million different names flagged by the Crosscheck system in the states of Georgia, Virginia and Washington revealed that the lists were "heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garicia, Patel and Kim - ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic."

So what it boils down to is that Kobach is essentially an architect of reactionary laws of dubious merit that sanction the targeting and profiling of American people of color and ethnic minorities based on the unjustified conservative-fueled fears of minor civil infractions.

Kobach's brand of "shake the tree and a bad apple will fall out" legal chicanery is part of the larger overall Republican strategy to secure majorities in Congress; as Palast notes, the majority of the twenty-eight states where Crosscheck is used have majority-Republican state legislatures.

So when those tight Senate races in critical swing states like New Hampshire and Ohio come down to the wire, Republicans hope Crosscheck and it's database full of faulty data will make the difference.

Sound absurd? Par for the course for the party that nominated a serial sexual predator as it's nominee for president.

Dinesh D'Souza Gets "Ghetto" On President Obama

Conservative commentator Dinesh DSouza

Author Dinesh D'Souza is once again making media headlines for yet another in a long string of dimwitted, racially-tinged comments about President Obama.

As Olivia Kittel of Media Matters reported earlier today, in response to Obama being interviewed on BuzzFeed recently to promote the upcoming deadline to sign up for health care, D'Souza took to Twitter to post a photo of the media savvy President taking a selfie with the following comment: 
"YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment." (Those are his CAPS not mine by the way)

So what does any of that have to do with the Affordable Care Act? Not much, but D'Souza has never been one to let little things like logic, sense, readability or truth get in the way of his fiery conservative prose.

His latest 93-word Tweet is vintage D'Souza (see example below) and pretty much manages to sum up the kind of intellectually void claptrap he writes that makes him such a revered intellectual demi-god among conservative Republicans.

The conservative Indian-American author, commentator and Fox News darling has been peddling his delusional mix of unhinged political opinion, bigotry and right-wing propaganda since his days at Dartmouth College, where he took pleasure using his position as an editor for the monthly student publication The Prospect and as a writer on the Dartmouth Review as a platform for his homophobia, racism and intolerance for virtually anything that falls outside of the spectrum of Anglo-Christian, politically conservative and heterosexual.

D'Souzas's entrenched cultural elitism likely stems from his relatively privileged upbringing in Mumbai, India where he was born to parents who were Catholics; his father was an executive for Johnson & Johnson and his mother was a housewife.

His K-12 education in Mumbai's elite Catholic schools (and his father's influence) served as a springboard for him to study abroad in America; in of all places - Arizona, the land of Barry Goldwater and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio; same guy who harasses immigrants on the taxpayer dime, sued the president and sentences inmates to restricted diets of bread and water for relatively minor infractions.  

So if you consider where he comes from and how he was educated, his Ann Coulter-ish brand of predictable conservatism based on demeaning others actually makes sense.

Sad and pathetic yes, but it makes sense.

D'Souza's November 26, 2013 Tweet

D'Souza seemed to discover his purpose in the wake of the election of President Obama in 2008 as the Republican Party morphed into a breeding ground for right-wing conservative extremism.

The anger-filled Tea Party movement bankrolled by Charles and David Koch became an all-inclusive cesspool of bigoted, misogynist, obstructionist, fear-pandering reactionary philosophy - and D'Souza leaped right in.

He's been there ever since, gleefully yanking the chains of right-wing Obama haters by creating content that demeans the President because of his race; like the Thanksgiving Tweet D'Souza released on November 26, 2013 as millions around the globe struggled to make sense of the death of an innocent black teenager.

Just like the offensive Tweet above, his latest Tweet using words like "ghetto" and "vulgar" to describe the leader of the free world is basically the intellectual equivalent of "Obama has cooties", but again, that's who Dinesh D'souza really is when you get beyond the critically-panned books and paid speaking appearances at conservative think-tanks.

Frankly, a moralizing hypocritical wannabe-Christian theologian who cheated on his wife and is a convicted felon has a lot of gall calling anyone "ghetto" - let alone the President.

      

Dinesh D'Souza: The 'Sheriff Joe' of the Conservative Media Movement?

So I'm reading film reviews in the New York Times last Friday August 10th when I came upon a full-page ad for a film called "Obama's America: 2016". The cryptic subtitle read: "Love him, hate him, you don't know him - He is downsizing America."

Uh oh, I thought. I scroll down to check the credits and sure enough this cinematic masterpiece was co-written and co-directed by none other than right-wing writer Dinesh D'Souza (pictured above). For those of you who've been kind enough to follow my blog, you may recall that I wrote about D'Souza back on September 20, 2010 in the lead-up to the 2010 Presidential elections. [Read the blog to get the full story.] Disclaimer: it may be a bit self-serving to link to my own blog, but hey, you do what you gotta do.

Those of you who might not be familiar with D'Souza, don't let that bookish appearance fool you.
Ideologically, this guy is as far right as Ann Coulter and just as nutty as Michelle Bachmann. Two months before the 2010 Presidential election D'Souza penned a widely-panned Forbes Magazine article in which he tried to make the case that Obama, was somehow trying to radically re-shape US foreign policy in an effort to mirror the political views of his estranged Kenyan father.

Well, we've seen how that turned out. Bin Laden is dead, the war in Iraq is over, America has played a quiet but definitive role in the collapse of regimes in Egypt, Libya and soon, Syria; and US troops will soon wind down the war in Afghanistan.

D'Souza, born in India but raised in Arizona, has had nothing but contempt for African-Americans, Jews and homosexuals since he was offending people with his not-so cleverly disguised hate speech in college. Now it seems he's moved on to film.

It would take a psychiatrist to explain how a dark-skinned immigrant would allow himself to be used by American conservatives to bash minorities with pseudo-intellectual theories and baseless assumptions. It's almost like he's the 'Sheriff Joe Arpaio' of right-wing conservative media.

Speaking of media spotlight-loving unapologetic racists, the August 16th Rolling Stone article 'The Long Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe' offers a really penetrating look into the life of notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Like D'Souza, Arpaio has a long history of hating racial minorities in America, RS contributing editor Joe Hagan peels back the layers of this poster boy for intolerance with a must-read profile. Check it out.